'Air Balloon' songstress Lily Allen has confessed that reading responses to her new material from a focus group was really shocking because a lot of the responses were unedited, rude, and negative.

She explained to Pop Justice that songs from her new album, 'Sheezus', were played to a group of people who weren't told that the music belonged to her and they weren't exactly polite or constructive about what they heard:

"I accidentally got copied in on a whole bunch of it and reading it was one of the most horrible moments of my life. They don't actually tell the people what it is that they're listening to. So a lot of it was just people going 'is this Lily Allen? It f**king is Lily Allen', 'If this is her I thought she'd f**king retired the stupid c***!' This is about six months ago, too, so it really set things off well. The thing is, people who take part in market research: are they really representative of the marketplace? Probably not."

Allen went on to add that receiving mean feedback is completely unhelpful because she can't take anything away from it: "I find it totally unhelpful. My mum's a film producer and they do these market research screenings, and more often than not it's just like school - people don't have opinions but because they're asked for them they come up with something and then it becomes a statistic... I'm yet to see an example of market research where it's actually good."